


The Faun Metaphor

by toniwilder



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Hunting, M/M, feelings about parents, no animals are killed but lots of metaphors about hunting are afoot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:07:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26466139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toniwilder/pseuds/toniwilder
Summary: “Oh, absolutely.” Zelos shrugged. “Just didn’t take you for somebody who could sit and wait. Not really your thing when it comes to other stuff.”“Well, I didn’t exactly have much of a choice.” Lloyd shook his head. “We needed meat and Dad handled everything else. It was the least I could do, even if it was—is hard.”Zelos’s smile softened into something less one sided and a small puff of air sounded from him. “How noble of you.”[For flambydelrabies]
Relationships: Lloyd Irving & Zelos Wilder, Lloyd Irving/Zelos Wilder
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	The Faun Metaphor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flambydelrabies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flambydelrabies/gifts).



Lloyd hated waiting. He sat beneath the brush, eyes locked on the bait in the clearing with a small bow ready—his hunting bow— and waited and hated every second as they passed.

Dirk had taught him to hunt when he turned six and Lloyd had taken to parts of it easily—the skinning of the hare and the aim of his shots. What he hadn’t done well with was, shockingly, the waiting. Many evenings Dirk prepared a meatless stew and Lloyd stared down at his bowl. He blamed himself for the noticeably empty spots in the broth where protein would have perfected the blend of spices and vegetables Dirk had curated himself. All because he hated waiting.

Lloyd took a deep breath through his nose, forced it down into his lungs for one second two second three second, then let it out through his mouth like a lion’s breath. Beside him, Zelos shifted and let out his own soft breaths. He’d been unusually quiet, unusually patient. Lloyd turned to him, careful not to jostle the bush they were hiding in to avoid scaring any animals, just in time to see Zelos’s head tilt forward. Chin to chest, he let out more even, paced breaths as he napped.

Lloyd covered his mouth to keep from laughing outright.

The dawn peaked over the horizon and the light of the sunrise curled around Zelos’s red hair like a low simmering campfire. Lloyd reached out, still careful not to jostle the foliage around them, and moved a heavy strand of red curls back over Zelos’s shoulder so he could see his face. The Great Zelos Wilder, taking a nap in the woods sitting straight up, had the smallest trail of drool down his chin. The urge to snort got stronger and Lloyd clenched his jaw to keep his laughter down.

He thought about taking something foul from his bag, a rotten potion he’d yet to throw out in one of the towns or maybe some onion to settle beneath Zelos’s nose but he wasn’t fast enough. Before Lloyd could even reach into his bag, Zelos’s eyebrows pulled together and he grunted awake, arm lazily flailing out.

“Shh!” Lloyd grabbed his arm to steady him. When Zelos looked to him, it was without recognition, wild-eyed and scared like the prey they were waiting for.

“You okay?” Lloyd whispered. The recognition came back with the breach back to consciousness and Zelos nodded tiredly.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to doze off,” he whispered back. Zelos used his left hand, the one not being held by Lloyd, to rub at his eyes. “I didn’t sleep great last night.”

Before Lloyd could ask after him again, Zelos continued, “Are we still here?”

Zelos’s gloved hand, still the left, motioned in front of them and then back to the bush they still sat.

“Nothing has come by yet.” Lloyd sighed, then taunted, “They probably smell your frilly Meltokio shampoo.”

“If that were true, they’d come running,” Zelos replied, swift as ever. “Every creature in the forest would be lining up to meet the purveyor of such an elegant smell.”

Lloyd did laugh then, but kept it soft for the wildlife.

The two faced forward together at their empty wooded opening. Lloyd finally dropped Zelos’s arm and Zelos moved his hand so it rested on his own lap. They sat, quiet for a long moment that would impress anybody who knew them and were familiar with the tension between them. Tension thick and sweet like a freshly baked custard every time the two sat beside one another. Zelos took a deep breath and broke first.

“Who taught you to hunt?”

Lloyd looked down at his tiny hunting bow, not enchanted by any means but still clearly made with the skilled hand of a dwarven craftsman.

“Dad taught me. We lived outside of Iselia and didn’t have much money. People don’t just buy from dwarves, y’know? There usually has to be a reason like a festival. So, Dad wanted us to live as self-sufficiently as possible. He taught me when I was six and then after a few years it was kinda my thing.”

“Your thing, huh?” Zelos smirked.

Lloyd’s cheeks burned. He couldn’t help it when Zelos made that stupid face at him.

“What’s with that smirk? It can--!” Lloyd forced himself to lower his voice. “It can be my thing,” he finished in a whisper.

“Oh, absolutely.” Zelos shrugged. “Just didn’t take you for somebody who could sit and wait. Not really your thing when it comes to other stuff.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly have much of a choice.” Lloyd shook his head. “We needed meat and Dad handled everything else. It was the least I could do, even if it was— _is_ hard.”

Zelos’s smile softened into something less one sided and a small puff of air sounded from him. “How noble of you.”

They watched the clearing together. The next time conversation arose, Lloyd was the guilty party.

“Dad worked his ass off to look after me and, even though I’m not Raine or Genis, I’m not stupid. I knew he wasn’t my birth father. He didn’t have to do that.”

Lloyd remembered Dirk holding his hand out to Lloyd, all muscles and built with the strength like a tree trunk. Like he had been pulled out of the earth like every other great, organic thing. Lloyd remembered holding those great hands in his tiny, child’s palms and that Dirk’s beard would twitch with something that looked an awful lot like sentimental tears.

“Dwarven vow number four: Don’t depend on others. Walk on your own two legs,” Lloyd recited. “I don’t like that one as much. Dad said it a lot when teaching me things, so I would know how to do them. I’m not big on it.”

“Sounds like he was depending on you quite a bit,” Zelos hummed.

“I don’t think so. He could have done a lot more without me there, could have lived a much happier life if he hadn’t been living by Iselia for me to go to school.”

It hadn’t seemed like a divisive thing to say, but it rendered Zelos unusually speechless. Lloyd turned to him and inwardly cursed at that forlorn, thousand-yard stare Zelos got when a certain trigger had been pulled. Like a tangled weaving, certain topics pulled Zelos into trauma Lloyd likely could never know everything about.

“You okay?”

“I never really considered what Dirk gave up so you could go to that Podunk school,” Zelos lightly replied. He shrugged. “Pretty noble guy.”

Lloyd wanted to keep up this conversation. It flowed so differently than the loud bantering they had gotten into the habit of rolling in each day on their journey to collect the expheres. This quiet back and forth, where Zelos’s voice was so soft it barely registered in his vocal chords and each word seemed carefully picked to accompany whatever emotion had settled itself inside his heart.

“Zelos—”

Zelos shook his head and motioned forward.

A deer, in the clearing, had taken the bait. She was a doe, a little underfed despite the newly growing land from the world tree’s mana. Lloyd lifted his bow and emptied his lungs for the shot. He waited until his hand was steady and he could see the vitals.

He nearly screamed when Zelos’s hand rested on top of the arrow.

Lloyd hadn’t noticed the faun until Zelos had stopped the shot. It walked over to their bait and the mother stepped aside for it to eat, using her body as a cover from any predators. The baby’s tail flicked in the air and it ate the food hurriedly. Once done, Zelos clapped his hands together. Lloyd jumped. The two turned tail and ran up the hillside and away from them.

He groaned and tossed the bow onto the ground. “There goes dinner.”

“Damn.” Zelos smiled at him. “You were gonna kill a mom in front of her baby?”

Lloyd scowled. “It’s a deer, Zelos.”

“We don’t need that much meat.”

Zelos stood. “Let’s just buy from the next town. We’re fine for now. It’s not like we’re savages.” He held his hand out to Lloyd. Lloyd grabbed it, grumbling, and stood with him.

“Never bothered you before,” Lloyd pointed out.

“I’m a sucker for metaphor.” Zelos pulled his bag up over his shoulder. “You would be too if you remembered what happened with your mother.”

Lloyd considered it. “You think so?” he finally relented.

“I mean, you’re this much of a sap for Dirk living in walking distance of a racist town so you could know some other humans.”

Lloyd punched Zelos in the arm and got a loud laugh for his trouble.

“I am not a sap! He’s my dad and I appreciate him.” Lloyd grabbed his own bag, bow too, and stepped over the branches of the bush with Zelos. “Not that I don’t appreciate what mom did… She was about as intangible to me as Martel was growing up.”

“Intangible,” Zelos echoed, impressed.

“Shut up. I do listen to Professor talks, even if she doesn’t think so.” Lloyd huffed. “You knew your mom. You remember what happened. I just remember everything after. It’s different.”

“I suppose it is.” Zelos wrapped his arm around Lloyd’s shoulder.

“I’m not making fun of you,” he promised, suddenly kind. “I’m just saying, you’re attached to that bow because of what Dirk did for you and I’m…”

Zelos laughed.

“I guess I see myself more as a deer in the sights of a hunter than anything else.”

Lloyd frowned. They’d been on the journey for expheres for a little over a year together and Zelos, for all his talk during the regeneration, still attached so strongly to the image of The Chosen. When they went into towns, Zelos still wore the title like a uniform tattooed onto his skin and, then when they were alone in the hotel rooms, would berate himself for leaning into it all over again.

“You’re whatever you want to be,” Lloyd assured.

“Just gotta figure out what the hell that is, I guess.”

He squeezed Lloyd’s shoulder and rested his cheek against the muscle. “You should wear that dumb red jacket less. I like the tank top look.” Zelos leaned back and kissed the shoulder and Lloyd shrugged him off completely.

“Stop distracting me by flirting.”

“Ooh,” Zelos grinned. “That a threat?”

“It should be.” Lloyd shook his head for what felt like the thousandth time that morning. “But instead I think you get to be in charge of finding us food.”

Zelos rolled his eyes. “We’re right outside Luin. We’ll go there. You want to try a different threat? One that’ll actually be hard for me?”

The idea struck Lloyd like he’d been hit by the arrow he held in his hand. He grinned, turned to Zelos, and savored the fall of the redhead’s smug expression.

Lloyd lowered his voice, deep, so the threat really curdled in Zelos’s ears.

“Be nicer to yourself.”

“Oh!” Zelos grabbed his chest. “Oh no! He’s figured me out! Used my own self-loathing against me! Oh, Professor Sage! Come get your student, he’s finally surpassed his teacher!” Zelos feigned falling over and Lloyd finally gave into the urge he’d had all morning to laugh with his entire heart.

Lloyd wrapped his arm around Zelos’s shoulder, laughed harder when Zelos’s cheeks flushed and the bright red brought out the edges of his peppered freckles.

“Noo,” Zelos groaned. He tried to shake him off and Lloyd clung harder. “I’m the annoying one, you’re not being fair to me.”

“Since when have I been fair?” Lloyd grinned.

“I bet there’s a dumb dwarven vow—” Zelos tried to shrug him off again, “—that would be very against you torturing me.”

Then, in a deep and terribly accented voice that mocked Dirk, Zelos said, “Dwarven vow number 45 and three fifths, don’t be mean to Zelos.”

“Dwarven vow number ten,” Lloyd answered.

“Oh yeah?” Zelos peered up at him, twisting to get a good look over his shoulder at Lloyd. “What does that one say?”

“Play hard.” Lloyd kissed Zelos on his lips, pulled away and laughed when Zelos was completely red now, sputtering like a broken engine. “Play often.”

“Man,” Zelos groaned, “I really can’t stand you.”

Lloyd kissed him again.

Zelos finally shut up.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was commissioned by the wonderful flambs. Always supportive and always kind, please check out their own Zelloyd works!


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